Late August, 1524

One of Luther’s early supporters in reform was his university rector in Wittenberg, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt.  Karlstadt, however, had a further-reaching vision of ritual reform than Luther, and when Luther was away from Wittenberg—hiding in Wartburg Castle and working on his translation of the New Testament into German (May 1521-March 1522)—Karlstadt attempted to lead the townspeople in dismantling the parish churches’ icons and disposing of the Mass in services. The planned changes prompted Luther to come out of hiding and assert his leadership of ecclesiastical reform in Wittenberg as approved by Elector Friedrich the Wise, the ruler of Saxony.  Relations between the two allies chilled, as Luther successfully lobbied his prince to have Karlstadt reassigned to a pastorate outside of Wittenberg. In May 1523, Karlstadt accepted a pastoral position at a parish church in Orlamünde, on the southern fringe of Saxony. But soon he began introducing changes that were again too drastic for Luther: he now indicated that adult baptism was more sensible than infant baptism, questioned the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the selection of professional pastors on the basis of academic degrees, and advocated the removal of images from churches.

In late August 1524, Luther agreed to meet up with Karlstadt at an inn in Jena in hopes of reconciliation. But they parted with Luther regarding Karlstadt as a heretic. Within a matter of days, word got back to Elector Friedrich, who ordered Karlstadt to be banished from his realm.  Karlstadt did not manage to find a long-term home for the next decade. But he kept writing texts, which proved to be an influence on the followers of Zwingli who began questioning infant baptism in Zurich. For instance, at the very same time that Karlstadt was likely setting out into exile from Saxony, Conrad Grebel was in Zurich sending a letter north to Thomas Müntzer in which he named Karlstadt and Müntzer the two “purest proclaimers and preachers of the purest divine word.”¹

Mid-November, 1524

The first text that Karlstadt published after his banishment from Saxony, in mid-November 1524, was a direct response to Luther’s arguments during their discussions at Jena and Wittenberg. He titled it: “Whether One Should Proceed Slowly, and Avoid Offending the Weak in Matters concerning God’s Will.” In the tract, he contested Luther’s position that ritual aspects of worship should be changed only gradually out of concern for “weaker brethren” who would be so disturbed by physical changes to their church experience that they would miss the essential doctrinal insights about salvation that evangelical preachers were sharing in their sermons. 

Karlstadt wanted extensive and immediate reform because he believed that God viewed worship practices as essential to Christian life too. He considered the images of the saints that filled many churches to be a form of idolatry that distracted people from worshipping God; he called the icons “idols” and warned that they “are more dangerous in Christendom than whorehouses”—presumably because they had the appearance of holiness while channeling people’s attention away from directly relating to the one, holy God.  He rebutted the common medieval idea that “images are the laity’s books.” This notion justified icons and images as a legitimate medium for illiterate Christians to access the stories of Scripture and God’s provisions for the Church throughout its history. But Karlstadt insisted that this justification was an invention of the devil to lead Christians into disobedience of the Second Commandment.²

Given the stakes of God’s disapproval of idolatry throughout Scripture, Karlstadt contended that reformers could not wait for “the weak” in their churches to come to a correct understanding of God’s commandments before they acted to reform the church’s worship spaces; they need to lead by action. He asked rhetorically, “May one steal until the thieves stop stealing?” To apply the question to church life, he meant to ask: may clergy tolerate idolatry in their churches as long as some laypeople in their congregations were still attached to their old icons? Using the analogy of a small child who wants to play with a sharp knife, he insisted that a clergyman can faithfully express “brotherly love” to such people only by taking away the icons, just as a loving parent would take the knife away from the child. He also drew on Matt. 18:8 for support: “If your hand offends you, cut it off and throw it away.” Applying the bodily metaphor at the congregational level, instead of at an individual level, Karlstadt claimed that strong Christian brothers must snatch away the icons from their weak brethren to help them avoid falling into idolatry.³

Karlstadt also turned to the example of the children of Israel in the land of Canaan: “God did not command the Jews to preach to the heathen before doing away with their idols. But what are our idolatrous Christians except heathens twice over?” He cited Old Testament texts that commanded the Jews to destroy every idol after conquests over other tribes, and he concluded that the same applied to evangelical Christians: they “should not have regard for any temporal authority. Rather, freely and on their own, they should strike and overthrow what is contrary to God, without preaching beforehand.”⁴

In short, Karlstadt believed that there could be no reform of the church that would please God without the destruction of idols that polluted church sanctuaries. In waiting for the permission of local rulers or the agreement of other laypeople before removing icons, Luther and his fellow reformers in Wittenberg were failing to show true brotherly concern for the souls of people in their congregations and failing to lead the church to testify to God’s transcendence and holiness, as Israel once did among the nations.  

Although Karlstadt’s view on icons was similar to that of early Anabaptists (for example, Conrad Grebel and Balthasar Hubmaier), there is a significant difference in the way Karlstadt envisioned reform being implemented. While the Anabaptists would withdraw from parish churches that they found objectionably furnished to worship according to their convictions in voluntary societies, Karlstadt desired change to be enforced in parish churches by the clergy, regardless of whether the congregation’s members agreed. For him, compromise was not an option, and reform required strong clerical initiative to change culture. His response to Luther might best be summarized in the phrase, act first and convince later.

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. Conrad Grebel, Letter to Thomas Müntzer (Zurich, 5 September 1524), in The Radical Reformation, ed. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41. ↩︎
2. Andreas Karlstadt, “Whether One Should Proceed Slowly,” in The Radical Reformation, ed. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64, 66. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 52, 64-65. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 72. ↩︎